In 2015, the Government of Morocco and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S. aid agency, signed the Morocco Land and Employability Compact. This Compact includes a project to title 46,000 hectares of collective land in the Gharb region, thereby turning it into private property. Privatization of collective land in Morocco aligns with mainstream development discourses that argue for formalizating tenure status and integrating customary lands into market systems. These discourses emphasize that market integration leads to greater productivity, enhanced access to credit, and increased land values, all of which benefit rural populations. However, they largely fail to account for how agrarian transformations resulting from privatization have differentiated impacts on different rural population groups, particularly young people. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in rural youth among both academics and policy-makers. This burgeoning literature often claims that young people have little interest in either working in agriculture or continuing practices of family farming. At the same time, young people’s interest in agricultural work is framed as one key factor determining the future of rural life around the world. In Morocco, studies have noted inter-generational tensions over access to land, new modes of agricultural production, as well as desires by some rural youth to maintain their family farms. However, the integration of land into market systems as well as gendered and class-based opportunities structure which young people are able to take advantage of rapid transformations in the countryside. In this paper, I address the ways in which young rural men in the Gharb plain conceive of their current and future positionality within systems of agricultural production in the context of ongoing tenure transformation. My research is based on three months of fieldwork in the region, using ethnographic observation and semi-structured interviews. I frame this project at the border between agrarian political economy and youth studies, drawing on concepts from both. Agrarian political economy emphasizes shifts in modes of production, changing practices of land tenure, and the integration of rural labor into market systems. Youth studies, by contrast, emphasizes how young people practice the life period of youth, which is best seen as a socially constructed category that marks a transition between childhood and adulthood. In this paper, I use an integrated analysis that combines a model of shifting agrarian structures with a youth-centric framework to understand how young rural Moroccans position themselves as subjects in a rapidly-transforming countryside.

Around the world, the image of storytellers enchants young and old alike. Storytellers bring to life contexts and morals set in times of an unknown past that carry significance on our lives in the present. In Morocco, storytellers open their tales by stating “kan ya makan, fi qadim al zman…” (similar to “once upon a time…” in darija or Moroccan Colloquial Arabic). In public gathering areas in the past, storytelling was performed in a halqa configuration, where storytellers performed within and interacted with audience members arranged in a circle around them (Amine 2001). Today, Moroccan storytelling is disappearing from public venues. The disappearance is most striking in places such as the famous Jemaa el Fna Square in Marrakech, a historical location for public storytelling and other forms of performance (e.g. Hamilton 2011; Sehlaoui 2009). However, while many believe that storytelling is disappearing, emerging young storytellers are creating partnerships with new locations to continue storytelling around Marrakech. I argue that youthful storytellers have sought to revive storytelling, but do not fit the stereotypical image of the older Master storyteller of the past due to their ages and their choices for new performance venues. These young storytellers are actively searching out new performance locations because public venues, such as Jemaa el Fna Square, are seen—today—as too noisy and as places people pass through, not spending time with cultural practices and performances. For this presentation, I will examine how young storytellers are changing their performance locations, how this impacts their performance behavior and interactions with the audience, and how seeking new locations demonstrates a hope for “revival.” Throughout my ethnographic fieldwork from April 2016 to September 2018, I attended performances in a range of venues in Marrakech, including cafes, youth centers, universities, and large auditoriums. How can something as simple as a change in physical location transform storytelling performance and strategies of interacting with an audience? How is storytelling translated to different locations where elements like the halqa circle are impossible to spatially reproduce? Engaging with my ethnographic fieldnotes, interviews, and discussions with young storytellers, I will examine how a change in place influences the atmosphere of the telling, and how these young storytellers are actively crafting new places of performance for storytelling in Marrakech.

In 2003, Moroccan authorities jailed 14 metal fans for promoting Satanism and damaging Islam. In the days that followed, the arrests were met with mass protests of young Moroccans characterized as much by their anger at the injustice as they were by joy, celebration, and music. The resulting musical movement was named Nayda – from the Moroccan root n-w-D meaning “to rise” – it encouraged young Moroccans to creatively construct an essentially Moroccan identity that was liberated from the power of the state, inviting comparison to Spain’s 1980’s Movida movement (Caubet 2008). Fifteen years later, things have changed. Movida in Spain is celebrated with museum exhibitions that reframe the intentionally unstructured movement to fit within the boundaries of national institutions, and reinterpreted by contemporary pop music bands with a message seemingly distant from the movement’s anti-establishment roots (Nichols 2009). Nayda’s signature festival L’Boulevard came under fire in 2008 for accepting a royal grant to partially fund the festival (Caubet and Miller 2013). Following Stuart Hall’s (1998) definition of popular culture, the institutionalization of cultural movements is inevitable: the state will cynically appropriate symbols of the culture of the masses in order to exert control over popular consumption. The institutionalization of popular culture may also be entered into semi-willingly: in order for creative production to be sustainable, artists are forced to seek institutional legitimacy (Shapiro 2004). How, then, does the underground sustain itself while remaining liberated? In Morocco, an emergent underground culture has developed over the past five years in the form of the Hardzazat festival. The festival rejects institutionalization by aligning itself with the DIY ethic, embracing radical channels for creation and knowledge sharing (Hemphill and Leskowitz 2012). To eschew the reach of Moroccan institutions, the movement has forged a network of ties with DIY activists living outside of Morocco, making the movement sustainable through the support of a transnational community. In this paper, I will show how the Hardzazat movement maintains the sustainability of the underground through its connection to the transnational DIY movement. I will use public statements made on social media by the Hardzazat movement and ethnographic observations of the 2018 Hardzazat festival in order to trace how the movement aligns itself with anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-system DIY movements abroad in order to maintain an anti-establishment movement that is liberated from official institutions, and compare this movement-building with the experience of other underground movements such as Nayda.

Following 2011 uprisings, states, media, and international organizations discourses on youth in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have intensified in two binary directions; one as a group that presents a threat to the security and fabric of the state, potential denizens of unemployment, delinquency or extremism. The other, as a group that constitutes an untapped potential, the hope for addressing the ills and flaws of their societies. This in turn, on the one hand, depicts Moroccan and MENA youth as passive victims of circumstances, on the other hand, it glorifies their abilities to contest their life circumstances without taking into account the complex contexts they confront. While the structural realities are surely real and sometimes paralyzing, youth deploy several tactics, strategies and subversive accommodations to get by. This paper explores whether, and how young men and women in Morocco exercise their agency in their everyday lives. The data draws on the findings from a field study focusing on the agential potentials and challenges of young individuals from an underprivileged neighborhood of Sidi Moumen in Casablanca as they describe their everyday paths to becoming. Focusing on the differences of their expressions of agency across various spaces in accordance with their socio-economic and cultural contexts, this paper analyzes the strategies and tactics they deploy to that end. Through discussing the notion of getting by, this paper challenges the mainstream conceptions of youth agency as "empowerment," resistance and freedom, and instead suggests that the aspirations of youth, as well as their everyday struggles, needs to be contextualized based on the material conditions in which they are living in, through their voices.